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Show HN: Flash replacement
- 100-xyz 7y agoOP here. I am looking for user advisors with some animation experience who can direct future developments (which features to develop further). Anyone interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOT com Also, the Dilbert and related characters used in the demo are Scott Adams copyright and are used only for Demo purposes.
- IvanK_net 7y agoHi, are you familiar with my library IvanK.js ? It has the "Flash interface", but for scripting. I used it to port several of my flash games to the web: http://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=spritesheet http://lib.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=spritesheet
- 100-xyz 7y agoThis version has the following: Library of images that you can click to use. A simple script engine that uses simple english to create the animation (Action script equivalent) eg: Wait 2 seconds. Car move to Point p1. Uses sprites. Created files can be exported and imported into a player. Can also be included in your pages.
- bdeshi 7y agois this open source? doesn't seem to have any license info.
- to1y 7y agoNice work. Can't help but miss flash seeing this though.
- Const-me 7y agoAnimations glitch in MS Edge.
- darkwater 7y agoIn Firefox (Ubuntu) as well
- adamzegelin 7y agoAnd Safari 11 too.
- 100-xyz 7y agoThere was a server crash. Hopefully the glitch is now remedied?
- Const-me 7y agoNothing changed, take a look: http://const.me/tmp/buggy-flash2.mp4 http://const.me/tmp/buggy-flash2.mp4
- 100-xyz 7y agoHi const-me, darkwater2, adamzeglin, Thanks for pointing out the error. I have found the bug, but this is not a quick fix one. Will include it in the next version. Thanks again for the heads up.
- jonplackett 7y agoNice. But still miss flash...
- adamzegelin 7y agoHardly a flash replacement.
- em-bee 7y agoit was only a matter of time for something like this to appear. there was a reason flash was popular. the problem with flash was not what it did, but how it was implemented, as proprietary browser extension. doing the same with standard, browser supported javascript solves that problem. getting rid of flash was a long, hard battle. it potentially would have been easier if alternatives like this appeared earlier.
- krapp 7y agoThis is not even close to the first Canvas-based animation tool, nor is it a valid replacement for Flash. It's an MVP at the level of tutorial code. A nice effort but don't oversell it.
- faraday2211 7y agoLaravel seems to be crashing (not surprised). But isn't HTML5 a decent replacement for flash already?
- welly 7y agoAre you here just to make attacks on Laravel?
- ActionHank 7y agoYes, but tooling is no where near as integrated an experience. Especially for animators and game creators.
- faraday2211 7y agoAnd if it wasn't bad enough that the site is using Laravel, that framework is also exposing a ton of sensitive data about the server. Perhaps disable dev mode? Anyway horrible choice of a framework.
- locusm 7y agoYou went to the trouble of creating an account just for anti Laravel dribble. Please enlighten us.
- robinduckett 7y agoI've had an account for years and I agree. I find it hard to justify using PHP for anything in 2019.
- welly 7y ago> Anyway horrible choice of a framework. I love unsubstantiated attacks on software.
- dang 7y agoThis comment breaks not only the HN guidelines but also the Show HN-specific guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here? We're trying to prevent the thread from becoming toxic.
- thrownaway954 7y agoYou're database is crashing: Illuminate \ Database \ QueryException (HY000) SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1114 The table 'errors' is full (SQL: insert into `errors` (`url`, `trace`, `updated_at`, `created_at`) values (2601:589:4a80:ba00:8590:6c18:79d6:3ffc: /flash2/editor, /var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:624<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:459<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php LINENUM:411<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Query/Processors/Processor.php LINENUM:32<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Query/Builder.php LINENUM:2657<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Builder.php LINENUM:1353<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:839<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:804<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php LINENUM:667<br>/var/www/its-near/app/Exceptions/Handler.php LINENUM:54<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php LINENUM:314<br>/var/www/its-near/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php LINENUM:118<br>/var/www/its-near/public/index.php LINENUM:55<br>, 2019-12-10 09:44:05, 2019-12-10 09:44:05))
- blauditore 7y ago>General error: 1114 The table 'errors' is full That's pretty ironic...
- 100-xyz 7y agoThanks for letting me know. Did not expect such heavy traffic.
- k_ 7y agoThere are other flash "replacements", the one I like the most being Haxe [0] (transpiler to flash bytecode, javascript, and more) + OpenFL [1]. OpenFL replicates flash API [2], can work with Adobe Animate (formerly flash), and can use swf assets [3]. There are also converters from AS3 to Haxe, both available and not yet released (like the one used to migrate Forge of Empires [4]). Haxe + OpenFL can export to flash player, HTML5 but also to native (desktop, mobile, consoles). [0]: https://haxe.org https://haxe.org [1]: https://openfl.org https://openfl.org [2]: https://api.openfl.org/ https://api.openfl.org/ [3]: https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/using-swf-assets/ https://www.openfl.org/learn/haxelib/tutorials/using-swf-ass... [4]: https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/haxeup-sessions-2019/dan-korostelev-migration-of-empires.html https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/haxeup-sessions-2019/dan...
- fenomas 7y agoI think this project is aimed more at Flash's authoring story. Haxe etc. are fine as frameworks, but what really made Flash popular and useful was the IDE.
- AshleysBrain 7y agoOur startup builds a Flash replacement called Construct 3: https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net It's a web-based animation/game development IDE with support for JavaScript coding too.
- mrieck 7y agoOk someone else mentioned their startup so I'll mention mine. My startup is a free cartoon maker: https://www.superanimo.com https://www.superanimo.com There's a ton of competitors in a similar space but I think mine is the best if you want to make cartoon stories quickly. It also exports to MP4/GIF and is free. It doesn't have scripting, but if you're just looking to drag/drop things on a canvas and animate them on a Flash-like timeline, SuperAnimo is great option.
- ActionHank 7y agoBoth these options are nice, but its a hard sell in big corps to put IP in the cloud.
- dpcan 7y agoI don't see any comparisons here. Flash had a timeline based animation system with vector graphics, animations, easing, tweening, etc. Does Construct have anything like that?
- seanalltogether 7y agoThe scripting interface and stored actions actually remind me more of Shockwave then Flash. I bring it up because while Shockwave was simpler to use in some ways, it also couldn't compete with Flash in terms of broader flexibility.
- 100-xyz 7y agoHow about advising me on how to develop this further? I am looking for people like you :-) - those who like animations and have some experience in Shockwave / Flash. If interested please shoot me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOTcom
- seanalltogether 7y agoThe advice I would give you is to maybe decide whether you want to build an animation tool or a game tool, and stick with that for now. Flash is still one of my favorite runtimes just because of how powerful it was, but there was a lot of complexity under the hood and isn't something I would recommend someone replicate as a side project. If you want to focus on an animation tool, you'll want to think about things in terms of timelines, and how you can create independent animations with their own timelines and combine them into other timelines. A good example from your website would be the santa walk animation is one timeline, which is placed inside another timeline that moves from left to right, which is in another timeline that that controls the top level animation. Nothing needs to be scripted in this case, you just visually lay out when a timeline should start and stop and appear or disappear like any other video editor. Timelines can be played in parallel or one after the other etc... On the other hand if you're thinking of creating a game engine you would focus creating a canvas that can programmatically add or remove VisualObjects (static images or animations that you could create in a simple timeline format) and then be able to provide other devs control over the x,y coords of where to position that visual object for every fps time interval that the game is running at. They would additionally need to be able to control which frame in the visual object to show so they can control forward, backward, stop, etc... Sorry not much more I can provide for guidance but that would be a general start
- afandian 7y agoReminds me of SMIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integration_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integr...
- tyingq 7y agoDo you have an email address? Your app has a bug where it's popping up some kind of Laravel debugger, and it's exposing things...like where the web-world-readable file with all the collected emails is.
- iMage 7y agoUnder a different comment he said his email is "leisenming AT protonmail DOTcom"
- tyingq 7y agoThanks...found that comment in his history. Email sent.
- p410n3 7y agooh that file shouldnt be accesible anyway
- 100-xyz 7y agoThanks for the email tyingq. Appreciate it. Fixed it. I've been up almost all night and am groggy :-)
- larsnystrom 7y agoI never used flash, but if this is what it was like I can see why flash was so popular. I'm loving it. Reminds of the time I spent doing WC3 maps when I was younger. Don't listen to the naysayers, just keep at it. You got something here.
- 100-xyz 7y agoThanks for your comment and encouragement. I am amazed at the negativity!
- dang 7y agoNegative comments make much stronger impressions than positive ones, alas, but when I survey this thread I don't see it as so negative (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21750978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21750978 which is a trollish post that we moderated). Based on a lot of experience moderating these things, I think the issue was primarily your title. HN users react badly to grandiose claims. Also, the title "Flash replacement" is so large and generic that it was inevitably going to evoke comments about Flash replacements in general. This is obviously a nice piece of work, and the best way to present it would have been with a more neutral title that depicted what you've built so far, and then a first comment in the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a better direction. And in your comment you could certainly have explained that your intention is to work on a Flash replacement.
- 100-xyz 7y agoI had actually submitted with the title 'Flash is Dead? A replacement attempt version 3'
- dang 7y agoAh I missed that. Yes, the submitted title was "Show HN: Flash is dead? Here is a replacement – version 3". Not sure that's less baity though. Arguably more, which is probably why a moderator edited it.
- userbinator 7y agoA lot of others here talk about authoring being what made Flash popular, but the other big part of it is the SWF format itself, which is highly efficient because of its compact encoding and ease of parsing. Those who played Flash games on computers over a decade ago may remember what I mean --- a tiny file provides high quality vector graphics and interactivity (and the ads, although I hear that these days they're just as obnoxious even without Flash...) HTML/CSS/JS doesn't even come close, although it feels like they're slowly reinventing bits of Flash with things like WASM.
- bbmario 7y agoThis. And this is also the reason why gaming on HTML5 hasn't picked up yet: there's no widely supported container format. I can't easily share/distribute/version HTML5 games like it was possible with SWF containers. On top of that, it's also not easy to "watermark" HTML5 games. With SWF, you could create custom loaders and force ads and logos, both core revenue models for gaming websites.
- dynamite-ready 7y agoTbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered a community of developers who didn't see themselves as programmers at all. They saw themselves as artists. And users benefited a great deal from that. In fact, some aspects of the IDE were so good, that some 'developers' didn't even care to use it to develop programs. They produced cartoons instead. I think Craig McCracken's Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was the most successful work of this kind. In the place of that creativity now, we have cleaner code, to be sure, but we now also have an awfully boring technology war, and a load of unnecessarily complicated UI code. I might miss Flash a whole lot less, if someone created a HTML5 authoring tool with the same toolkit the Flash IDE once had.
- WorldMaker 7y agoIsn't that what Adobe Animate still tries to be? It has HTML5 authoring support, and inherits from the Flash IDE directly (not just in spirit). Arguably I think the saddest difference between Flash and Animate is the business model. In the old web, Flash was also partly so ubiquitous because it was sometimes so commonly pirated and passed around among aspiring developers/artists. In the Creative Cloud era it is a lot tougher to pirate, and can be a huge cost overhead for small or aspiring artists.
- bbayer 7y agoIt is definitely something but not Flash replacement.
- djsumdog 7y agoWell everything has to start somewhere.
- nathancahill 7y agoMight want to set APP_DEBUG = false for production.
- _bxg1 7y agoIn some ways Unity is the new flash. It isn't pretty but it is accessible, it lets you prototype and throw together highly graphical creations with minimal technical knowledge, and then ship them on all platforms (including the web). And it's free.
- ActionHank 7y agoYour 90s website is cool and all that, but this is hardly a Flash replacement.
- siddhartpai 7y ago@100-xyz, The current page isn't working as expected. The images are all getting 404'd.
- 100-xyz 7y agoHi siddartpai, By any chance are you reopening a previously created animation? If so, it may get 404'd. The server ran out of disk space and I had to delete a large number of animations. If not, can you provide some more details: are you landing directly on the url https://its-near.me/flash2/editor https://its-near.me/flash2/editor? What OS/browser? Are you getting any other errors that may help me narrow things down? Thanks